A BUSINESSMAN who may have been sleepwalking when he battered his elderly father to death, broke down as a pathologist revealed the catalogue of injuries sustained by the victim.

Jules Lowe put his head in his hands and sobbed as the jury at Manchester Crown Court heard evidence from a post mortem on his 83-year-old father Edward.

The trial Judge, Mr Justice Henriques, allowed a distressed Lowe to leave court as the rest of Dr Naomi Carter's findings were put to the jury.

Dr Carter said she found a total of 90 injuries on Mr Lowe Senior, who was found dead in the drive of his home in Windmill Lane, Walkden, one morning in October 2003.

He had 33 injuries to the head and neck, 15 to the body and others to both arms and legs.

The victim's nose was also broken and he had 12 rib fractures and a haemorrhage over the surface of the brain which, she said, was probably caused by repeated blows to the head.

"I think the head injuries indicate repeated blows and I think they are entirely in keeping with repeated punching, kicks and possibly some stamping," Dr Carter told the jury. Lowe, 32, denies murdering his father after they had been out drinking together with Lowe's older brother and business partner, David.

The jury has been told the issue in the case was Lowe's state of mind at the time of the incident.

As reported in later editions of the M.E.N. yesterday, the court heard that Lowe has a history of sleepwalking and there could be evidence from experts to the effect that the attack occurred after he went to sleep, or when he was in "a confusional arousal state" when he was coming out of sleep, but still unaware of what he was doing.

Prosecutor Richard Marks QC earlier told the jury: "If that is right and at the time of the attack he had no knowledge of and no control of what he was doing so that his acts were involuntary, there would be available to him the defence of automatism."

But Mr Marks said that, although friends, relatives and experts showed he had a history of sleepwalking and of being in a confusional arousal state, it was the prosecution case that that defence was "far fetched in the extreme".